We are making life simple for both home owners & tenants: Pankhuri Shrivastava, co-founder & CMO, Grabhouse

1) What motivated you to choose entrepreneurship?I was always fascinated by women entrepreneurs and their ways, however, for me, it was not a goal that I had set. I was busy and happy teaching at Teach For India, and it was then I went through the ordeal of renting a house. After changing five houses in two years, I had a problem in front of me, which was renting an accommodation. It was then I thought of taking matters in my own hands and solving the problem for the rest of the society. This problem motivated me to be an entrepreneur.

2) What is the core aim of your business model and what kind of problems are you trying to solve?Finding and renting out an accommodation is a pain for anybody who has moved cities, and getting the right tenant is a problem for those who have properties to be rented out. Our core aim is to make life simple for both the tenants as well as the owners by being the bridge to fill the gap. We are here to solve the problems related to house renting and make the process seamless and easy.

3) How has the experience been so far of doing business in an unorganised sector like real estate?It is a challenging task to do business in an unorganised sector. Moreover to get people to believe in your product and make them come to your platform when there are so many players has been quite challenging and exciting at the same time. Innovating on a daily basis and finding newer ways to solve the problem is something which excite us and keep us going. We were the 13th player to enter the home renting market and to be amongst the top 5 today is something which we see as an achievement.

4) What has been your biggest learning in the due course of establishing your business?There is a lot of learning that happens in the course of setting up a business. It’s a journey where one needs to proceed step by step from getting the idea to formulating and making it concrete. It was all new for us; we didn’t even had the experience of working in corporate. However, one of the learnings has been that I learned to play different roles at the same time. In the initial phase of a startup, one doesn’t have too many resources; so it’s you who needs to step in to all the shoes.

5) What are the challenges you faced so far?The first challenge was that we had entered a cluttered market and we had to align ourselves to it and start doing business. Second and a major challenge we faced was that people till now had been used to taking the traditional route of house hunting through a broker. Being the first broker free platform, the major challenge for us was to make people accustomed to using the online route. Also, getting the owners to list their properties on our platform was a challenge. Most home owners were not tech savvy people and did not understand the convenience of doing business this way.

6) What has been your worst business mistake, and what did you do to overcome it?I do not think we have committed any worst mistakes as such. We have had mentors who have guided us well and we too have always made sure that we test things for a longer period of time and then launch so that the chances of failure are minimum. We did pilot certain models and when we saw that those are not scalable and would not help us solve the problem efficiently, we discarded it. At least till this point, we haven’t committed any major mistake and hope that we don’t do it in the future either.

7) Who is your role model and why?I have always believed in the saying of being your own hero. I have never had a role model as such; rather, I believe in doing good and always followed my heart.

8) Where do you see yourself and your company in 5 years from now?For any start up, more than starting, the challenge lies in sustaining. Five years from now, I would like to see Grabhouse to be a sustained business and would like people to type Grabhouse on their search bars while looking to rent property; like we type Google invariably to look up for anything we want to know.